JOE: Obviously you and I have played a ton of games together over the years, and, having been gamers before we met (which is coming up on fifteen years ago!), we ought to have smashingly good ideas of what kinds of games we prefer. I think I can outline my needs for tabletop/board/card games at the cellular level: I like lots of little pieces, I like heavy customization within the given ruleset, and I like the game to tell a story. If a game can hit all three of those, it's probably something I'm going to adore. Of course, that's in addition to the overarching concern that the game ought to be fun, balanced and challenging.

MIKE: I would have to say the types of games I most enjoy are both simple and complex at the same time. Traditional games like chess, Othello, backgammon, Scrabble, poker, bridge (it's hilarious finding anybody at all under the age of pensioner status who will play, let alone know the rules to, bridge) are quite simple to pick up and play, with a very small investment in energy. There are no six page rulebooks, T-chart algorithms or wordy directions. Chess has only six types moving pieces per side. Both chess and Othello have only 64 squares. Your home in backgammon will always be your home. Bridge openings usually have at least twelve points, probably thirteen. Those blanks are gold in Scrabble. Easy enough. But scratch underneath the surface and each of those games can become remarkably complex; after only five moves for each person there are over a trillion different board combinations possible. Othello is not so complex, but it is a game that requires patience and attention. Backgammon and poker are all probability and odds, which I love. (Math is your friend kids!) And Scrabble is less a word game and more of an odds and math game, which plays to my strengths.

However, if you discount my strengths, I find that in playing all of those games there is only a small amount of luck involved. Chess is my favorite because there is absolutely no luck involved at all. In Othello and chess you all get the same pieces and if you lose, you deserved it. That's great. Backgammon, Scrabble and cards have some luck, but not as much as you might expect. In the short term there are fluctuations, but in the long run the results hold pretty consistently. In addition, no matter what the outcome, I always feel like I learned something when playing those games - looking for patterns, connections in cause and effect, and improving my ability at reading odds. So I guess I should also throw that learning piece in there as well.

JOE: See, right away we're headed in different directions, since I almost never desire to play those traditional games. I didn't learn the poker hand ranks until I started playing Doomtown.

Not to dis backgammon and the like, but I just can't get into the abstract nature of those classic games. I feel like I'm not doing enough, or I'm not getting enough visual stimulus. And that abstractiness is built into those games. I don't think you could make Justice League Backgammon and I'd be convinced... it's still a math thing and the only point to winning is winning itself. For me, the fun is in re-creating some little pocket tabletop universe and directing it towards some logically-stipulated conclusion. As in, I chucked The One Ring into Mount Doom, or I ended the day with the most control of Gomorra, or I defeated the Boss Ghost and escaped the Lost Village. I guess I'm looking for the drama of it all, and if the game lacks that theming, I'm likely to give it a pass.

Out of the games you listed, chess is the one I would be most likely to play (lots of pieces, an obvious war story, a dramatic finish) but even that drains me before too long. It's just not enough for me. The only chess I played to any extent was Battle Chess on my Apple //c... and I have almost purchased Knightmare Chess several times... which is just a deck of cards that you add to a regular chess game to give the pieces special powers and whatnot. Or did I actually buy that? I forget.

Now, I did give Icehouse the old college try (probably a $60+ college try), and it just didn't work for me. I liked the overall concept - generic playing pieces usable in multitudes of free games - but the critical failure was when I tried to play games that applied dramatic rulesets to those abstract pieces. The disconnect was painful. I would probably really like RAMbots and Homeworlds, but when applied to those faceless, interchangeable pyramids, I found I couldn't keep my focus. In contrast, I liked multiplayer IceTowers and Volcano, but as abstract stacking games, they're not the kind of experiences I would go to.

I have found my limits, though. For as much as I like tabletop-based worlds and dramatic player-directed stories, I just can't do miniatures games. I tried, seriously tried, with Great Rail Wars... but the rules were just too floaty. Somebody knocks over a mini and there's a fifteen minute fight while everyone agrees how it should be stood back up. I gave MageKnight and HeroClix a fair shot, but grew quickly frustrated with the absurdly complicated color chart system. The only game of this type that has passed my muster is Pirates, mainly because the little ships are both cool-looking and inexpensive. But I still hate the ruler-based movement and combat range... it's just too easy to fudge, and even the teenciest fudging can swing the victory. I need the rules to be exact, explicit and all-encompassing.

MIKE: Part of my problem with elaborate games is that I believe you really don't need all that much stuff to make a truly engaging and interesting experience. While I know you have a huge jones for games with hundreds of miniature spiders, penguin tokens and graham crackers, all that crap just makes my interest level wane since it's just so much more stuff to wade through. Really, so many times I just want to pick up a game and play and figure stuff out as I go along. Often, but not always, having all those tokens just means more screwing around with rule clarifications. Did that miniature just topple onto its side? How many points do I have to spend to align my army soldier to magnetic north? What if the I don't have the lucky carrot to win that fucking insanely hideous, worse than Hack-N-Slash, full of lameass insider jokes, Killer Bunnies? What a pile of putridness that was.

To be continued...